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Afterschool

Synopsis

Bullied prep school loner Robert (Ezra Miller) captures his classmates' various escapades on video, but when he winds up filming two girls fatally overdosing on cocaine, his footage plays a role in the emotional fallout within the school community. As the students and faculty at the sheltered academy try to cope with the tragedy, many spiral into despair. Antonio Campos directs this film, which explores the ethics of voyeurism.

A much deserving selection at Cannes (Un Certain Regard) and New York Film Festivals, Afterschool has much to say about high school life and our media-saturated culture.

The film focuses on an introvert named Rob who, while doing a film project at a private boarding school, catches two twins dying due to ingesting drugs contaminated with rat poisoning. Instead of calling for help, he simply watches them deteriorate. Though the incident is caught by a security camera and cellphone, Rob's face remains invisible. This creates a paranoid, almost oppressive environment at school. Rob and another student, Amy, are assigned the task to create a memorial video, which isn't accepted because it veers from the norm. The duo however end up…

If Campos had stuck to his guns and made a film about disaffected youth and the modern video age, I probably wouldn't have minded it too much. When he started breaking out the 9/11 metaphors though, I'm afraid that's when he lost me. It's all just a bit too heavy-handed and unfocused.

And I think it's possible to overdo that thing where you use shallow depth of field and abstract framing to convey dissociation and alienation. It can sometimes be good to have a shot or two where you can actually see everyone involved in the scene clearly. You know, for variety.

A devastatingly dizzying entrance into the confusion of a teenager learning how to synthesize the broken pieces of information scattered throughout his brain in a way that allows him to live with others and himself, and also (somehow, amazingly) a pointed assessment in how the proliferation of video heightens the brokenness and resists the synthesis. (That's not a sentence, but perhaps you'll forgive me as I'm writing about failed attempts to synthesize scattered thoughts?) For Robert, there is no beautiful mosaic here; the broken glass remains broken.

In Margaret a teenager slowly realizes that the world doesn't meet her expectations for what makes sense. In Afterschool a teenager never learns that his mind, which is to make sense of the…

Despite a superb performance from Ezra Miller and the sense of style in the film, Antonio Campos ends up creating something that isn't very involving while most of ends up being very pretentious in its compositions and doesn't go for anything heavy.

Alternately fascinating and frustrating, this willfully disturbing drama is about the moral uncertainty that envelops an elite prep school when a student (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN's Ezra Miller) accidentally records two popular girls overdosing on cocaine and keeps filming rather than going for help. There are many great (if underdeveloped) ideas here about a generation numbed by YouTube, and director Antonio Campos is obviously a big fan of Michael Haneke. It doesn't quite all hang together, but Campos is certainly one to watch.

The first and only time I ever saw this movie anywhere was on Pedro's list of favourite movies. Whenever I see an English-speaking movie on someone's list of favourite movies that I've never heard of, I get very interested. I'm glad I saw Benny's Video before this because the movies are VERY similar. While I can't say which one is better, I thought this one was a lot more realistic. I bought into this more. I actually empathise with the lead character (as I'm sure most pubescent boys inevitably do in varying degrees). The film captures contemporary voyeurism very well and it really did do it well. People are fascinated by disturbing stuff online and the impact it has can…

Bizarre and mesmerizing, Afterschool has a clinical way of examining every scene that feels all too real. The movie ends up more of a psychological character study than anything else, which isn't to say it's bad, but the approach can be so slow at times that it becomes a bore. All of the pieces might not fully come together in the end, but the performance by Ezra Miller alone is a must-see.